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A Venerable Internet Technology May Offer Some Relief for Carrier Woes

As Nominum’s chief scientist, Mockapetris has led the company’s efforts to continue to improve DNS and increase its profile. His success is reflected in Nominum’s blue chip customer roster, which includes 130+ carriers and service providers around the world. Together, Nominum’s customers currently process more than one trillion DNS queries a day.

But the company’s most significant contribution to the Internet’s evolution may be happening now. Nominum recently unveiled what it calls a “three-tier architecture,” a new approach to DNS that basically makes it much easier for companies to build applications that tap into the intelligence that resides in the domain name system.

“DNS has always been the repository of the data of what is going on in the network,” Mockapetris explained. In addition to keeping track of where websites are located, DNS also knows where bad actors or suspected bad actors can be found.

This makes it an effective tool for fighting online crime, and particularly botnets. These large networks of compromised computers can be used for everything from sending out spam to launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. They were recently cited by U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano as posing as great a risk to national security as Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-related groups.

Using DNS, carriers can prevent infected computers, also known as zombies, from communicating with their controller, provided that the controller is using the domain name system and not some other form of communication. “In our analysis, we found over two-thirds of botnets have a domain name associated with them,” said Jose Nazario, senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, a security firm offering DDoS protection.

Between 10 and 25 percent of all home machines in the United States are believed to be infected with some sort of malicious code, and the numbers may be even higher in Latin America and other parts of the developing world.

Cablevision was able to reduce its botnet infection rate by over 60 percent by using an app built on Nominum’s new architecture, according to Baletti. In addition to shutting down botnet activity, Cablevision also used the app to let customers know they were infected and to suggest ways they could clean up their machines.

“We didn’t know all the different ways that DNS could be used,” Baletti said. “Nominum showed us there were a lot of ways it could benefit our subscribers.”

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